From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 08 2002 - 12:14:56 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> writes:
>> In fact, to implement the above, the only changes to the standard are:
>> a) Making sure the control messages have the ability to include the
>> new, 16 bit character group names.
> I think that is already covered:
> Control: newgroup news.groups; prettyname="New Newsgroup Proposals"
That's a good solution for fantasyland, but we still need a good solution
for the real world.
The checkgroups equivalent is the easy part. newgroup has some
significant problems already given the way that the newsgroup description
is presented in the control message. I'm tempted to think that we need a
new control message for newgroup as well, so that we can fix various
problems like that.
The nice advantage of control messages is that while it's some effort for
the hierarchy administrators to send two control messages for each group,
one in the new format and one in the old format, it's not *that* hard, and
once that's done you've got complete forward and backward compatibility
for the server software. The old control message format won't go away for
a long time, but that's not a huge problem. And if you just make the real
name match the group name unless the new control message format was used,
new software can handle the old format easily.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>